4 Place to Use Quizzes in Content Marketing…. that aren’t JUST for fun!

The beauty of content marketing is in its versatility. The reason it’s such a successful strategy is that there’s a content type to suit practically any audience’s tastes and needs.

For example, need a way to get some statistics across to your audience that’s easy to understand? Create an infographic. Want to establish yourself as an influential figure in your industry? Create a video showing how people can solve specific problems. Want to qualify your prospects so you’re only targeting your ideal clients? Create a relevant, valuable lead magnet that addresses one of their needs.

But the variety of options in content marketing can also work as its biggest disadvantage. When you have so many methods to choose from, it can be difficult to pinpoint the best route to draw the attention of your target market.

Your content strategy needs to begin at the end, with your ultimate goal and CTA in mind.

It’s easy to say, ‘I already have [X material] created, so I’ll just use that’. But applying the wrong content type to achieve a specific goal could have some devastating results.

For example, if your goal is to create awareness for your brand and you begin by bombarding prospective customers with a long, aggressive email series, you might completely lose their trust – something that is very difficult to undo.

Alternatively, if you’re looking to build relationships with new clients, creating content that is geared towards promoting other products could alienate them and leave a bad taste – just when you’re at the beginning of your relationship.

If you’re not really sure what your content goal should be right now, and therefore what content to create, we have just the thing…

Quiz Yourself!

At Content Sparks we love to play with our content. We’re constantly looking for new methods, platforms, and ideas, and we’re excited about testing them.

Our latest endeavour is exploring the art of the quiz – encouraging an audience to interact and have fun while also providing some self-discovery. From a marketing perspective, quizzes are one of the most engaging ways to draw in new leads, segment them based on their needs, and offer personalized content and recommendations.

Quizzes can be used in almost any circumstance; provided they’re structured correctly.

So, where can you use quizzes in your own content creation?

We’ve identified four main goals for content. These goals correspond to the key parts of your sales process or ‘client journey’. They’re the places where you always need to create content based on your audience’s questions and needs. The four goals are:

1. Awareness
2. Lead Generation
3. Relationship-Building
4. Products and Service

You can apply the technique of quiz building to each of these goals in the following examples;

Awareness

With awareness content, your goal is to get onto your target client’s radar. You want them to start seeing you as an authority in your market and someone who can help them with their problems.

People love learning about a topic that’s interesting and relevant to their own situation, and they love it even more when the content is personalized to them. What better way to get on your target audience’s radar than providing them with a fun quiz that is focused primarily on them? And when you include a call to action that leads people to your website, blog, social media profile, or lead magnet…. then you've just achieved the first, critical step in drawing your prospective clients into your funnel.

Lead Generation

The goal of lead generation content is to qualify prospective clients to make sure they're interested in what you have to offer. That means providing content that addresses very specific problems related to your solutions. When you request an email address to send your content to, you’ll only get those prospects who make sense for your business.

Quizzes can be as specific or as broad as you’d like them to be, so it’s easy to segment your quiz takers and personalize the next content you send to them based on their answers. By focusing the topic of your quiz on something relevant to your products and services, you’ll also pre-qualify all quiz takers. It’s highly unlikely that someone will provide their email address if they’re not truly interested in the results of the quiz.

Relationship-Building

Your goal with relationship-building content is to create a dialogue with your audience, whether it’s leads or clients, and give that extra ‘wow’ that converts them to clients and to loyal followers who buy over and over again.

If you’re already well on your way to building a loyal list of subscribers, you can use quizzes to refine the process even more. Let’s say that you have a few different products to offer your customers… you can use a quiz to find out which option might work best for them, and tailor what you approach them with according to their answers. Once again, they’ll appreciate the personalization.

Products and Services

The goal of content for your products and services is to create paid solutions for your ideal clients. This is the heart of your business and you need to make sure you always have a range of offerings to satisfy your clients’ needs.

You can use quizzes to promote your products or services in a number of different ways. As we mentioned with relationship building, you can quiz your existing customer base to find out what they might be looking for. You can also use quizzes in the same way as you did for lead generation and awareness – pulling in participants who may not have heard of you before and then leading them directly to relevant products.

Another creative way to use a quiz platform is to get feedback on what you’ve already sold. Ask customers to complete a quiz about different aspects of something they’ve already purchased from you, then tweak your processes accordingly. This is more similar to a survey, but using a quiz format and making the questions more fun will get you a higher completion rate. You could even do a quiz that tests customers knowledge of your products to see if you're doing a good enough job educating them!

Back to You…

Once again, the key is knowing where to direct all of your content creation efforts. Begin with one of the four content goals in mind, and work backward to figure out which content format might get you there.

Then, if you want to try your hand at using quizzes for that goal, grab some of the ideas in this article to get you started.

And, to make things even easier for you, use our easy Quiz Set Up Checklist to make sure you have all the right pieces in place to make it effective:

Finally, if you'd like to teach your own clients how to create quizzes that attract and engage their ideal clients, check out our brandable, done-for-you course:

All you have to do is download the content, customize it to fit your market and your voice, and then share or sell it to prospects and clients.

And have fun with it!